Shares of Demand Media (DMD) went on a wild ride today hitting an all time low of $5.24 before recovering back to its closing price of $5.62 a loss of over 13%.
Volume was almost 10X more today than the three month average of Demand trading over 4,000,000 shares.
Just a couple of weeks ago eHow announced they will be cutting back on the production of content.
Late this afternoon Demand Media released a statement on eHow saying:
“that its eHow.com website has recently experienced a decline in traffic, which the Company believes is temporary and was the result of an internal technical issue. ”
“The technical issue has recently been remediated.”
Some have thought recent changes by Google called Panda 2.5 may have attributed to the loss of traffic.
Shares of Demand are now trading at around 80% off its all time high of $27.38.
If someone starts telling a story and they begin with the words “Once upon a time, there were these three little pigs…”, you’ll have a fairly good idea of where that story is about to go and how it winds up.
There’s a chance that this time, it’s different; perhaps it’s a variant on the classic with a totally different ending or maybe it’s completely unrelated but for the most part, when someone starts off a story by saying “Once upon a time, there were these three little pigs…”, you know it’s going to involve straw houses and stick houses and brick houses and wolves and lots of huffing and puffing.
And just how do you know all that, based on a few words? Because you’ve heard that story many times before.
The DMD IPO was a magic fucking beanstalk.
Told ya so, told ya so, told ya so.
This on the coattails of the email I received today regarding the new .com price increase for my enom central accout (which is only a temporary landing place for NameJet wins). It said they strive to keep the prices as low as possible and never raise them, but they have no choice but to raise the .com price to $39.95 since verisign is raising the price (lol).
Gut feeling is this might be a sub $1 stock in a few years, didn’t expect it to fall as rapidly as it has. Chance of them generating a genuine profit is surely slipping further and further away.
Demand Media has absolutely nothing positive going on in my opinion. There is really no support for the stock. I don’t see why it won’t continue its march down.
Take a look at this email from ENOM today. Verisign is raising COM/NET prices by like 50 cents so now ENOM needs to charge $39.95? Pathetic.
_____________________________________________________
Valued Customer,
In July 2011, eNomCentral was notified by VeriSign that it plans to raise the cost for their respective TLDs on January 15, 2012. As with previous VeriSign price increases, eNomCentral must adjust our pricing such that we can absorb the increased costs for reselling VeriSign’s TLDs.
Historically, eNomCentral has always been resistant to raising our prices. Our goal has always been to provide domain name and value-added services at competitive rates. Unfortunately, based on this announcement from VeriSign, eNomCentral must modify our pricing to address the increased cost of reselling these VeriSign TLDs.
The purpose of this notification is to inform you of our new pricing.
Effective January 14, 2012 the new customer pricing will be:
New Tier Price: $39.95
_______________________________________________________
Brad – Every company has a different business model. eNom caters to resellers and their retail pricing is high by domainer standards. Sure, anyone can register domains with GoDaddy; that’s why they are #1 in number of registrations. But that’s why you have McDonald’s and restaurant chains: the option is in the hands of the consumer.
@ Acro
I believe their retail pricing was $29.95 before, but I might be wrong. So they jack the price up $10 to cover a $0.50 fee increase?
They have a steady flow of names from NJ that are sent to ENOM. I would assume they would rather keep them there, but I guess not.
Brad
Well the thing is that ehow is pumping more and more content and I believe that the traffic will rise despite the fact Google is trying to beat them in any way possible. The more unique articles will be written the more keywords will be targeted and traffic will increase.
As this is billion business they can think a lot more about SEO than just content and we will see significant traffic increase over the time.
Probably will be buying demand media stocks as I still believe in content farms
MHB, how much skin you got in the DMD game?
This won’t be the bottom. The <$1 prediction above might be more accurate than you think.
Tony
Ok so the 100% truth is that I got 1,000 shares of IPO stock and sold it on the 1st day of trading for around $23.50 and never took another position in the company, long or short.
I was going to short it but I hate to root for companies in our space to do poorly,
It just makes the next company that wanted to go public or get rolled up into a bigger deal that much harder.
There were over 100,000,000 insider shares issued and with an average float of 300K now 400K shares it doesn’t take a generous to realize that any attempt by any insider to liquidate shares is going to force the stock lower, much lower.
Having said that at some point enom alone being the 2nd largest register might make this an attractive acquisition for say web.com which owns register.com and netsol
Brad
Out of fairness I got the same email and enom prices start as low as $9 there is also several other levels from $10.50 up before you get to the rack rate of $39.95
You of course will see every registrar passing along this Verisign rate increase to its customers and I would be surprised if the registration/renewal fee got “rounded off” slightly more than just the exact 7% amount which is from $8.06 so around$.58 cents making $9 a natural price.
MHB,
Thanks for the candor. Did not expect that type of disclosure 🙂
You bought and sold your 1,000 shares on the 1st day of trading, yes? I mean they couldn’t have been Pre-IPO shares.
I kind of had a gut feeling you had some involvement with the trading of the stock to follow it so persistently over the trading lifespan of the stock.
Tony
No they were not insider shares. My broker told me he could get me 1,000 IPO shares so I took them.
Yes I sold them the same day.
I have no involvement with Demand other than using NameJet.com like anyone else.
“The DMD IPO was a magic fucking beanstalk.
Told ya so, told ya so, told ya so.”
Yes you did, yes you did, yes you did…and you were right 🙂
Expect a jump next month when DMD releases its 3rd Quarter report. It’s finally reached the price where the buying is going to start in earnest.
Content farms have a massive future on the net.
where is the pool on the DMD stock price after 1 year? I seem to remember a poll somewhere…
“But that’s why you have McDonald’s and restaurant chains: the option is in the hands of the consumer.”
Acro,
I’m not sure of the relevance of that comparison.
There certainly is a difference between the quality of the hamburger meat you get in a steak house vs a fast food joint which justifies a price difference.
But there is no difference in the quality of a domain whether registered at Enom, Net Sol or GoDaddy or anywhere else.
It’s the exact same domain but the price paid isn’t.
Enom, Net Sol, Register get away with higher prices because of their legacy but also I suspect their (business) customers don’t have lots of domains so the annual fee isn’t so much of a concern.
I believe customer (price) ignorance and inertia also play a part.
Trico is correct.
And there are some smart customers who actually have registered domains with NetSol for 6.99 because they know the pricing rules and simply asked for this price.
If you really want to find an indicator of site “quality” based off of domain names, then you might want to consider number of domains registered.
Compare the sites of registrants who are have regsitered 100’s, 1000’s or 100’s of 1000’s of domains to those who only control one or two.
The findings may be interesting.
DMD is going to go the way of the online ad firms that install their hardware at certain ISP’s to track consumer behaviour and insert stuff into response packets, so that content can be inserted into requested pages real-time. Most of them have failed. It’s just too creepy for people to accept and most of these firms were forced to shut down.
DMD is not quite as sneaky, and their method is slower than real-time, but it’s the same idea. They track what people request through Google, generate content on the fly and inject it into the results page. In DMD’s case, the insertion is not at the packet level but at the level of the search engine results page.
It’s not as if the information people are searching for does not exist. DMD just games Google via “SEO” to push their “quality content”, generated on the fly, written by underpaid “experts”, to the top of the results page.
People can probably accept this practice even though it makes Google less effective at searching for quality content. Google of course might not be too keen on it however. What are the long term effects?
But what’s evil about DMD is that they must know this is a flawed and doomed model and yet they chose to go public and take investors’ money.
re: “But what’s evil about DMD is that they must know this is a flawed and doomed model and yet they chose to go public and take investors’ money.”
A: ouch… that said I can’t say the same thought hasn’t crossed my mind in the past.
The folks who put up the $350mil that capitalized DMD had to be thinking that an IPO was the only way they’d realize some or all of their original investment any time soon.
But I am also someone who thinks that the results Google shows, it does so to ensure Google sends people to a place where they can get the info they need, based on seeking it from Google. So what DMD has submitted is crafted to deliver value, regardless of how much it cost them to produce it. If the content did not satisfy the searchers “intent” as defined by Google, not DMD , then I do not think Google would include the links. Seems pretty straight forward to me.
The weak link in DMD’s model to my way of thinking is building such a business on top of a foundation you neither own nor control in any way whatsoever. Depending on Google for traffic is worse than having Mother Nature as your business partner. Mother Nature at least follow laws of physics, and operates in somewhat predictable cycles. Google does whatever the hell it damn well wants whenever the hell it chooses. As they should.
Google has captured the domain parking space and they did that long after they “pwned” the search space. They are for all intents and purposes the Mother Nature of internet traffic. Like the 70s margarine commercial says “it’s not nice to nice to fool Mother Nature” (http://youtu.be/LLrTPrp-fW8).